…fail yourself,
…fail your wife,
…fail your children,
…your family,
…fail your life.
These moments are not possible without extremely strong, vulnerable and trusting relationships and the structures we create to support them.
What are you doing about yours today?
Here’s another plug for a book I just finished and currently re-reading this time much slower and with deliberate reflective insight. Looking for a place to start? Start with yourself and let this be your guide.
This is an image of a man in command of his life, fully vested (having the rights to) and invested (contributed effort) completely in it. He’s become a remarkable man, living a notable life because of it. He didn’t start that way. Few of us do, but years back he took agency of his life and sought to seek and to verify his own truths, find his own way through life and to strive to become the individual he is today. It is truly remarkable due to the sincerity, conviction and conscious determination to do just that. Equally as remarkable, is that he openly shared his experiences, understandings and realizations with others and then brought together so many of us from different ages, passions and places to join him in doing the same (this blog is a direct testament to that).
It’s called leadership when you live by example and then inspire others by words and deed in efforts to support them in achieving their personal potential. It’s what makes Anthony such a valuable friend and mentor, he just doesn’t say what he knows or believes, but lives them. I intentionally created this blog to share my experience, knowledge and awareness of cultural and political context of the sexual market place, because of his influence. A very large and unspoken portion of what personally drives me is to make personal atonement to not only the people I hurt romantically in my past, because I wasn’t the man I wished I could have been and didn’t have the knowledge to voice what I can now, but also to also soothe and reassure my own insecurities, fears and anxieties about the very real risks, dangers and dis-incentives men face when facing committing to relationships in our current environment (and they are quite severe). What I am faced with by his example is a clear understanding of just how jaded, defensive and armored against living life I have become, especially with being trusting, vulnerable and open to real intimacy.
Anthony has in the past and continues even today to lavishly shower me with praise credit for sharing with him, what I knew, understood and believed about life and relationships which help lead him to Marilee and I am deeply touched by that recognition and sentiments. To be fair our relationship is far from one-sided and if anything the pendulum is now clearly swinging the other way. The stated goal and objective of this blog project for me was to “provide a stepping stone for men who desire to shape and author their lives and embrace the responsibilities in having committed relationships. In effect, those wishing to ‘Man Up!’, but doing so with wisdom and honed ability. I hope to be one voice, reaching a thousand lives, that will drive a revolution.” Tomorrow when Anthony and Marilee marry and commit their lives to each other, I will count them as my ‘first’ step towards that thousand, not because I haven’t helped others, or their level of commitment to each other, but because I have witnessed first-hand, thus know it to be true what happens when a man is determined to create the life he desires and in part I know I’ve been some of the steel that’s sharpened that man.
Ultimately what I am struck by is that as individuals we must be prepared for the realities of our world, but also learn to lay down our shields, to put down our spears, to feel the sunshine upon our faces and take our place under the sun, if we are to really live. Look again at the photo above and tell me you don’t see a remarkable man, living a remarkable life, because I sure do. …and he’s showing me by example. Our world needs far fewer Leonidas’ of the Men’s Rights Movement and more Anthony and Marilee’s. What an amazing gift they are giving each other and us as a consequence tomorrow.
Monogamy isn’t instinctual. Sorry it just isn’t. If it was, both men and women would have the same base biological sexual desire drivers and monogamy would be a simple and only accepted fact of life for coupling. It isn’t, and men and women furthermore, simply don’t have the same mating instincts as the other.
To compound this, as indicated in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, our limbic system, at it’s very basic, is simply geared towards a differing reality, one of the survival of our species, where love, affection and life-long commitment doesn’t play a role, but one of biodiversity through diversification of our genetic material, by both sexes, clearly does.
The silver lining here is that our brains have evolved greatly over time and while it is recognized that this brain development has greatly aided our ability to expand our thinking and to adapt to and overcome changing environmental conditions, one of the most significant and still relevant to us today, are the social changes that evolved with those biological changes, that I believe, were at the core of our evolutionary success and survival; the family unit. I have no doubt that the graphic curves for brain development over time, matches resources, energy and education investments in child rearing and development over time as well.
As social structures go, gender partnering for child rearing was a significant improvement over previous patterns of behavior and lead to the first social specialization, one based on gender.
Of which several more social structures and social evolutions were to come and go, the last, which we are currently experiencing, is the rapid feminization of our society, (following the post-industrial revolution), which is also the first time in human history we’re seeing dual sex specialization, or specifically in large part, feminine parity across our social structure.
While traditional monogamy may be a cultural and societal ideal, and for good reason, it goes against one of the deepest evolutionary inclinations that biology has given men- to biodiversify. While historically this was always an issue, cultures and societies have provided institutions and stop-gaps to promote, maintain and sustain this family structure, moral codes, social standings and marriage. This is increasingly not the case in our society, nor the hallmark of our age today. As our culture, politics and laws promote massive changes to family structure and family law, which remove much of the incentives, safe-guards and benefits for entering into these structured relationships, they are furthermore are incredibly disproportional in their gender biasness favoring women to defy belief; open and widespread of divorce culture, ‘No-fault’ divorce, asset division, alimony and child custody laws, the acceptance and promotion of single motherhood, and open and accepted suspension of accountability for women, which is giving rise to ‘new age spinsterhood’. The damage enacted upon individuals, relationships and families are truly staggering. It is getting to the point that reasonable men are justifiably questioning not only the governing political institutions and laws, but their very involvement with women (see any men’s rights organization or ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ organizations to get a very real sense of this growing disenfranchisement among men in society). Other men are responding directly to this shifting cultural change and giving women the types of men and relationship structures they’re actually choosing (being free to do so), which has given rise to douchebags, deadbeats and players throughout society, which is increasingly awash in their bastard offspring.
As men we’re being asked, and demanded to relinquish our natural sexual and biological evolutionary instincts to commit to a single individual, at the same time women are increasingly free to and enticed to act upon their hypergamy, their natural sexual and biological evolutionary instincts, even within a committed relationship. If we are to do so, we need to take incredible precautions in finding, filtering, screening and selection of a partner, as well as respond to this environmental social context by developing ourselves and working with our partners to foster, develop and maintain the social skills needed to be successful within it. This means being incredibly discriminating about who we let into our lives, absolutely controlling of our DNA, to prepare, protect and to promote the types of relationship we truly want, need and desire and to actively work with our partners to recognize and manage hypergamy.
Our relationships are a consequence of who we are as men, what we expect for and of ourselves and for our lives. Managing commitment is an absolute essential first step to accomplishing that task and objective. We must be aware and vigilant of the high cost of cheap thinking and unintended consequences that comes with cheap sex and easily given commitments.
Manning Up Smart 